TOKYO The incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans, including children, as enemies during World War II is a historic experience that has traumatized and galvanized the Japanese American community over the decades.
For George Takei, who played Hikaru Sulu aboard the USS Enterprise in the Star Trek franchise, it's a story he's determined to continue telling every chance he gets.
I consider it my mission in life to educate Americans about this chapter of American history, he said in a recent interview with The Associated Press.
He worries that the lesson about the failure of American democracy hasn't really been learned even today, including among Japanese Americans.
The shame of internment is governments. They are the ones who did something unjust, cruel and inhumane. But very often, victims of government actions shoulder the shame themselves, he said.
Takei, 87, has released a new picture book aimed at children aged 6 to 9 and their parents, called My Lost Freedom. It is illustrated in soft watercolors by Michelle Lee.
Takei was 4 years old when President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942, two months after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, declaring all people of Japanese ancestry enemies of the United States and forcibly removing them from their West. Coastal houses.
Takei spent the next three years behind barbed wire, guarded by soldiers armed with rifles, in three camps: Santa Anita Racetrack, which stank of manure; Camp Rohwer in a swamp; and, from 1943, Tule Lake, a high-security segregation center for disloyals.
We were seen as different from other Americans. It was unfair. We were Americans and had nothing to do with Pearl Harbor. Yet we were imprisoned behind barbed wire, Takei writes in the book.
Throughout it all, his parents are portrayed as enduring the hardships with quiet dignity. Her mother sewed clothes for the children. They made chairs from scraps of wood. They were playing baseball. They danced to Benny Goodman. For Christmas, they had a Japanese-looking Santa Claus.
Takeis is a remarkable story of resilience and the quest for justice, repeated throughout the Japanese-American experience.
It’s a story that has been told and retold, in books like 1973’s Farewell to Manzanar by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston; Only What We Could Carry, edited by Lawson Fusao Inada more than 20 years ago; and the just-released The Literature of Japanese American Incarceration, compiled by Frank Abe and Floyd Cheung.
David Inoue, executive director of the League of Japanese American Citizens, headquartered in Washington, D.C., believes the message of Takei's book remains relevant today.
He said discrimination persists today, as seen in anti-Asian attacks that have erupted with the COVID-19 pandemic. Inoue said her son was taunted at school in the same way he was growing up.
One of the important things about having books like this is that they humanize us. He tells stories about us being just like any other family. We love playing baseball. We have pets, Inoue said.
Takei and his family were sent to Tule Lake in northern California because his parents answered no to key questions on a so-called loyalty questionnaire.
Question No. 27 asked if they were willing to serve in the U.S. armed forces. Question #28 asked if they pledged allegiance to the United States and would renounce their allegiance to the Emperor of Japan. Both issues were controversial for people who had been deprived of their basic civil rights and labeled enemies.
Mom and Dad both thought both questions were stupid, Takei writes in My Lost Freedom.
The only honest answers were No and No.
Takei said the questions did not explain what would happen to families with young children. The second question was also a dead end, he said, because his parents felt there was no loyalty to Japan to denounce.
Tule Lake was the largest of the 10 camps, housing 18,000 people.
The young men who answered Yes became members of the all-Japanese and American 442nd Regimental Combat Team, who fought in Europe while their families remained incarcerated. The 442, with its famous motto Go for Broke, is the most decorated unit of its size and length of service in American military history.
They were determined to prove themselves and get their families out of barbed wire, Takei said. They are our heroes. I know I owe them a lot.
After Japan surrendered, Takei and his family, like all Japanese Americans released from the camps, each received $25 and a one-way ticket to anywhere in the United States. The Takeis family chose to start over in Los Angeles.
In 1988, the Civil Liberties Act, after years of effort and testimony from Japanese Americans including Takei, provided a $20,000 reparation and a formal presidential apology to any surviving U.S. citizen or legal resident immigrant of Japanese ancestry incarcerated during World War II.
Takei's voice choked as he recalled that his father had not lived to see him.
He noted with pride the diversity represented in Star Trek, a television series that debuted in the mid-1960s and developed a fervent following. There, the crew who flew together across the galaxies were of diverse origins.
Star Trek writer, creator and producer Gene Roddenberry wanted to depict turbulent times and the civil rights movement in a television show, but he had to do it metaphorically for it to be acceptable, Takei said.
Different people, different ideas, different tastes, different foods. He wanted to make this statement. Each of the characters was meant to represent a part of that planet, Takei said.
Takei recalled how his father taught him how government of the people, by the people, and for the people, as Abraham Lincoln said in his Gettysburg Address, could also be a weakness.
Everyone is fallible, even a great president like Roosevelt. He was struck by the hysteria of the time, the racism of the time. And he signed Executive Order 9066, Takei said.
